There is no lynch mob, not even in scare quotes. Tim Hunt hasn’t been harmed. He hasn’t been beaten or stabbed or dragged behind a truck or thrown in a river or hanged from a tree. He hasn’t lost a job. He lost honorary positions, and respect.

Young woman at Doctor Who Cares asked me whether she should go into science. Yes yes yes yes YESS. Please do. We need more women scientists.

That’s nice, but it’s also very easy. He says yes yes yes, but at the same time he calls women in science who protest against Tim Hunt’s public contempt for them a “lynch mob.” He calls them baying witch-hunters. He says yes women should go into science, but he also says no women should not publicly protest public contempt from senior male scientists. He says if they do he will call them names, not just on Twitter but also in letters to the Times.

Those are arduous conditions, and they’re unfair. “You can work here, we want you to work here, but you have to put up with a hostile work environment. We want you to work here, but only if you smile politely when we up here at the top feel like throwing some shit down at you. We want you to work here, but only if you accept that we consider you our inferiors. We want you to work here, but if you talk back we will use our power to make your lives shitty.”

Comments

Of course we need more women in science. Those test tubes aren’t going to clean themselves. Whose cleavage are we going to stare at during breaks, Tim Hunt’s? And that counting up stuff through microscopes and such, poring over those endless sheets of raw data, who’s supposed to be doing that? We need Rosalind Franklins and Jocelyn Bells to make the discoveries that we men can win awards for. I mean duh!

Kind of reminds me of how James Randi recently wrote how pleased he was that so many young people and women now attend his Amazing Meeting. When informed that Michael Shermer likely raped a 20-year-old woman at TAM 2008, he continued to invite Shermer as an honored speaker every year.

It’s not intrinsically noble to desire more young female participation, especially when your motivation is suspect. Dawkins seems to want “more women scientists” if and only if they contribute to his reputation and maintain the sexist status quo.

Saying “yes” to a question like that is almost literally the least anyone can do to support women in the sciences. It pretty much just places you a step ahead of the pseudonymous trolls who would reply “no, you should get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, hur hur hur.”

The harder questions are, what will you actually do to support the ones who decide to follow that advice? And will you make even the smallest sacrifice of popularity to do it? Will you support maternity leave policies — even when you and your other senior colleagues grumble about the inconvenience? Will you call out a colleague who only wants to hire attractive women, or who says his wife won’t let him hire the attractive ones? Or are you afraid of being labelled the politically correct one?

And what about your own behavior? Will you catch yourself thinking of a woman who argues back forcefully as “bitchy,” when you regard the same behavior from your male subordinates as just “standing up for your ideas”? Will you excuse and rationalize inappropriate workplace behavior when it’s stereotypically male (“sure, Bob had a tantrum and threw a glass beaker across the lab; he’s passionate and gets like that sometimes”) but not when it’s stereotypically female (“did you see Briana sobbing over her latest failure? It was so awkward!”).

Dawkins has given us some pretty big clues of how he handles those tougher tests, as has Tim Hunt. Pardon me if I don’t applaud just because he’s managed to answer a woman’s question without twirling a moustache and donning a fedora.

And can we get some clarification here? How does his resigning voluntarily qualify as an ousting by a SJW mob? A lot of women and men around the world sounded off online about his unfunny and quite planned/intentional remarks . This faux claim of innocent off-the-cuff remarks schtik is tired as well. he and Dawkins and Harris and Shermer and Hitchens and their like know exactly what they’re saying and what sort of reaction there is likely to be). It wasn’t a job, he wasn’t fired, and while someone may have suggested a graceful exit would be preferable to a series of protests and embarrassing the institution. But he resigned. He simply wasn’t ousted. And it certainly wasn’t femi-terrorists at Bryn Mawr or Shakesville who had anything to do with it. If there was any pressure on him to resign, it would clearly have had no effect unless it were from his mortified colleagues.

Dawkins was on BBC Radio 4 yesterday interviewed (brief sound bite) by Palab Ghosh, and complained that people should argue if they disagreed with Tim Hunt, not join a witch-hunt. I guess that if you meekly and quietly disagree without making a scene or drawing any attention to your disagreement and cause embarrassment, then that’s acceptable to him.
Crikey, but Dawkins is ridiculously un-self-aware. It’s disappointing to see journalists, who should know better, fail to challenge him.

How does his resigning voluntarily qualify as an ousting by a SJW mob?

Do you really not understand how resignations work in many companies and organizations? Your boss says “I’ll accept your resignation” i.e.: go write a letter of resignation because otherwise we’re going to fire you and you might want the fig-leaf. Obviously he didn’t resign voluntarily, or he wouldn’t have been complaining about it.

Marcus @12, whether or not anbheal understands what you wrote (which I don’t dispute), you certainly haven’t answered the question you quoted.

I do understand that you suggest the question is badly posed, because he didn’t resign voluntarily, but that is trivial. Whether he was ousted or he resigned, the causal chain between his incumbency and its cessation had the same proximate locus–the authority with the power to dismiss him–and so in either case the question becomes how it is the actions of “a SJW mob” were the ultimate cause of the resignation/dismissal.

I personally think they were a necessary but not sufficient cause.

As for the fig leaf: He could have stood his ground and faced the music, futile as it very probably would have been, and actually forced a formal dismissal. But he didn’t; he quit. That’s clearly a concession, in and of itself.

Do you really not understand how resignations work in many companies and organizations? Your boss says “I’ll accept your resignation” i.e.: go write a letter of resignation because otherwise we’re going to fire you and you might want the fig-leaf. Obviously he didn’t resign voluntarily, or he wouldn’t have been complaining about it.

Not so fast. According to the LCU, they were were trying to contact him, and before direct contact was made, Hunt tendered his resignation. That doesn’t sound so forced to me – it is entirely possible that they wanted to coordinate damage control, and he pre-empted that.